The United States Grand Prix kicked off a triple-header, coming off a month-long break after the Singapore Grand Prix. For Williams’ Alex Albon, the return wasn’t as smooth as he expected, with the Thai driver being knocked out of Q1 during qualifying at COTA. Contact with Valtteri Bottas at the start damaged his diffuser, ending any chance of points.
Coming into the Mexico Grand Prix, Williams once again found themselves facing a large repair job following FP1.
Albon lost his Williams in turn 9, hitting Oliver Bearman in the Ferrari, ending up in the wall with significant damage.
He was unable to participate in FP2 as the car couldn’t be repaired in time.
The next day, the 28-year old found himself in P11 in FP3, clocking a time of 1:17.511, 1.019s behind McLaren’s Oscar Piastri.
He recounts the car being fairly disconnected as they had not changed it in following FP1. This resulted in multiple tweaks to the FW46 ahead of qualifying.
The changes definitely benefited the driver as he put his car into Q3, qualifying P9 with a lap time of a 1:17.065. He comfortably outqualified Colapinto who got knocked out in Q1.
Although Albon found himself fighting with the car in certain corners of the track, he ended the qualifying session satisfied both with the result, and the car’s progress.
“We had a good car in FP1. We did two laps where we were actually quite quick in the two laps that we did do.
“It made us not really want to change the car too much for FP3. We put the car into FP3 and I think just with all the track evolution that’s come about, the car was quite disconnected.
“So we ended up making a lot of changes for qualifying. I would say most of them worked really well.
“There were a couple of things in the car that if I had a second chance at it, or if I had more laps, I would never have put it on the car. So we were kind of fighting a little bit in qualifying because there were a couple of corners on the track where we knew, ‘okay, we’ve got to just deal with this’.
“So I am happy.”
With the Mercedes drivers on their out laps and doing their thing regarding tyre preparation, the Thai says he picked up dirty air in the middle sector, costing him a shot at P7. He had been best of the rest in Q2.
“I think my lap in Q3 was actually starting off well. I had a good sector one and then when I got into sector two, I don’t know.
“The Mercs, they’re obviously really prioritising their tyre prep, which is fine, but they just gave me dirty air for all of sector two.
“I’m pretty confident we would have been in P7, but the points were there for the taking.”
Williams is currently only 4 points ahead of Alpine in the constructors standings, and Albon will be focused on finishing ahead of Pierre Gasly who qualified one place ahead.
He also expects Oscar Piastri and Sergio Pérez to struggle to come through the pack later today as it’s hard to pass in Mexico.
“We’ve got to be careful of the Alpine with Pierre. I obviously haven’t done a long run, so we need to bear that in mind. But I think we’ll be okay.
“I know actually that some of the set-ups stuff that hurt us in qualifying, it won’t be as bad in the race. So I’m positive.
“I just think it’ll be interesting to see where Oscar and Checo end up. I don’t think it’s that easy to overtake here in a DRS train, so I do actually think it will take them quite a long time to get past.”
The 28-year-old also talked about moving towards set-ups/tools used by the other car on Thursday, confirming he did do that.
Albon also added the type of corners where the car has not being feeling great for him.
“I definitely kept some of the stuff from the other car. It worked out quite well.
“Swings and roundabouts, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. In terms of set-up, not so much, but in terms of tools, I copied pretty much all of it.
“The last few weekends I’ve been disconnected consistently in the same kind of corners. They’re generally low-speed corners, 90-degree to 180-degree corners.
“This track is all of them, so coming into this weekend I thought it’s going to really hurt, we’re going to really struggle if we keep the same issues as we did in the last few weekends.
“Thankfully, we didn’t have that. That’s positive. I hope we can learn from it.
“We still haven’t got enough real laps to truly say if it feels better or not.
“But if we can take it from this weekend and apply it to the rest of the year, then I think it’s going to help me for sure.”
